Thursday, 20 June 2013

The Good Fairy of the Internet and her Magic Wand

Last week I attended the Index on Censorship ‘Caught in the
Web’ event. I asked a question from the
floor and was put on the spot by chair David
Aaronovitch about David Cameron's call for the big players to do more about child
porn on the internet. Answered along
the lines of not really understanding what more Cameron thought they could do,
given that the Internet Watch Foundation runs a list already; and needing to
examine any proposals to see if they carry too high a price in terms of
interference with freedom of expression.

OK as far as it went, but this is what I should have said.When politicians demand that the most visible
targets (ISPs, search engines, social media platforms) should do more to stop whatever
abomination is hitting today’s headlines, really they just want a
good fairy of the internet to wave a magic wand and make the nastiness go away.The trouble is that the good fairy is a myth,
the magic wand rubs out good stuff and the bigger the magic wand the more of
the good stuff it rubs out.And the
nastiness still doesn’t go away.

Worst of all, when each has had its turn at waving the magic
wand - the child protectionists, the responsible speakers, the cultural preservationists,
the extreme speech purgers, the adcensors, the promoters of the public
interest, the filth filterers, the religious reverents, the porn exterminators,
the benevolent regulators, the upholders of community standards, the real
namers, the guardians of the general good, the copyright cops, the internet
safety inspectors, the privacy protectors, the departments of public harmony, the
joke jailers, the moral champions, the speech cleaners and scrubbers and all
the clamouring crew of prohibitionists – what then is left?

If the fundamental human right of free speech means anything,
it is that we can build search engines without fear that the State will make us convert
them into suppression engines.

Please Note

The views expressed in this blog are the personal views of Graham Smith alone and are not attributable to the law firm for which he works or to any of its clients. Nothing in this blog constitutes legal advice. Always take advice from a suitably qualified legal practitioner in relation to a specific matter.